four times and counting
by Aneta
Summary: The men who have left, the ones that are leaving, and they all become the same in the end. -A look into Kensi's past.


**I'm so incredibly sorry to everyone about the long wait on 'fine lines,' but I felt like I needed to get this oneshot out before I could focus on the next chapter. **

**Reviews are appreciated.**

Disclaimer: It all belongs to CBS.

* * *

"_Men. They always find a way to leave you."_

xxxx

Your father is first in line.

A man with six hundred heartbreaks and a lifetime of good intentions, he passes quickly in the sudden heat of an engine fire that should not have happened. You were almost prepared for the war stories of nighttime gunfire, or the desert sands erupting over an army tank. But death by highway is something new and strange and tastes metallic in your mouth.

_When you are four years old, he teaches you how to ride a bike. Laughs louder than you all the way down the block._

Somehow, the words never come out quite right in your journal, and the funeral feels more like a forced effort than a time for remembrance on your relative's part. Your grandmother calls you Sandy; your aunt cries fat, rolling tears for a brother she never really knew. You pull awkwardly at the hems of your dress and shuffle your feet in the corner.

You wish your mother were here.

With her soft hands, kind words. She always whispered stories in languages from far away places, and assured you that as long as you were together, you could never truly be lost. The day she slips through the front door and into the bitter morning is fuzzy and worn in your memory, but when she pauses and looks back, you can almost feel her shame through the windowpane.

You waited up for nearly three months each night, committing the position of each star to memory and counting the seconds until you just _knew _she would call. Sometimes you heard your father's uneven footsteps pause outside your door, before disappearing around the corner, and you would feel a little better knowing that you were not the only one who had not forgotten. She leaves you long before you are born. She leaves your father before she leaves you. And she leaves herself in the dust of a gravel road she might come back to one day only to find them gone.

_You are six and a half when he deploys for the first time that you can actually remember, and the fluttering emptiness blossoms in your chest every time you step off the school bus to the greeting of an empty house._

And so abruptly, in the moments of quiet mourning, you find that you are alone. But you are learning these steps for the first time, and you are not worried when you discover that they almost come naturally. Because you are young and unaware. Because you are lonely, but not afraid.

You follow your uncle from base to base, and this is fine with you. A routine that is worn into your muscles, years of practice running through your veins, it does not bother you. You fight with your older cousins and you hide from your aunt in a towering oak tree when she tries to pull you away from the isolation you almost enjoy. Eventually, when you are eighteen, you find yourself surrounded by taped up cardboard boxes in an unfamiliar part of town.

It becomes a home of some sort of permanence, and it is something else, you think, to walk through the same front door for longer than a month or two. The easy flow of undercover work comes as a shock of sorts, and you slip into the roles with a suspicious ease. You fire a gun for the first time on the roof of an abandoned nightclub in the pouring rain and think that maybe all those movies weren't so far fetched after all. You put it away and do not look at the man's face.

_The summer you are eleven is when he first tells you that he is proud of you. And if your relationship with your aunt is sickeningly professional, and the one with your mother is smoky and dull, you think that this must fall somewhere in between because you cannot think of anything to say in return. _

The lights of an oncoming vehicle you never saw. The crack of gunfire he never heard coming and the ditch that eventually claimed them both. Your hallway is quiet at night and the only person who leaves early now is you.

And sometimes, the nightmares only creep over the outskirts of your mind, and you sleep.

_He leaves you when you are only fifteen years old, and you do not cry._

* * *

Your ex-boyfriend and your old partner fall from the same blow.

The partner is gunned down in the damp corner of a warehouse while you can only peer out from behind the molding crates and tremble. The ex-boyfriend, and technically, your last boyfriend, pulls the trigger and then crumbles from your own. Two bodies and a gun that will not let you forget who you are and what you have done.

Raw throats, burning sheets and tears that do not stop.

Who you thought you knew. The man who brought you coffee for three months before you gave him a chance. He picked you up after work and did not ask about the details you couldn't share. Patient and always kind, and you find yourself some kind of happy until the phone calls and drugs are suddenly not so hidden. So you leave him. Then you find him again accidentally on the closing end of a drug deal gone wrong and his blood is all over your hands.

You do not miss him because he hurt you. You also do not miss him because he killed your partner. And you feel sick and twisted because sometimes you truly believe he deserved to die.

Your (then) current boss, an aging man who has never actually lived through fieldwork, pushes new agent recommendations from the moment the casket is buried and you almost quit. Because in some twisted way, this is your fault, and the partner that was a friend first and foremost is hovering the corner. Ashy, rough around the edges, you can do nothing but file for transfer and stay up all night with the lights on. And if this is death, and if this is regret, then you will not look in the mirror for fear of what you might find.

You wonder if this is all there is to this job.

You wonder if this is all there is to you.

You wonder if one day when you aim and fire, and the body that hits the floor will be young and confused and wrong but not old enough to know what that means and you will not know how to handle something like that. Somehow, you have become so very afraid of becoming empty.

Fleetingly, you think back to the days after your father passed away. Of the following months that achingly stretched into years. When you had answers to questions no one asked and dreams that made you seem foolish and almost daring.

The answer is always no, and you know it and they know it, but you feel like crying anyways because no one else even hurts enough to try.

"_Agent Blye, I know you're upset." a voice thick with an emotion that does not reach his eyes, his fingertips resting much too casually on the paperwork in front of him. "But I simply cannot allow you to continue working alone in the field. You have until the end of the week to look through the files I gave you. After that, it's up to me."_

_So you nodded in something that was definitely not affirmation, and were on a cross-country flight by Thursday. _

And weight of bodies, bullets that seem to trail behind you like breadcrumbs, the apologies you cannot find the words for, they have packed themselves along with you and oh how some things never change. Your father is forever whispering how proud he is of you, your partner is always a little too far away to rescue, and your one-time lover now lives on only to remind you of how very wrong wrong wrong you have always been.

You leave them all behind in graveyards because you are afraid of what they have yet to say.

They leave you behind because everyone makes choices, and that is why there are deserted houses and empty guns and slowly pulsing hearts.

And somewhere, in a memory that is not yours, but will not die all the same; you are still cradling the cooling body of a colleague you might have saved. Disinterested eyes and you will not forget the bloodstained clothes that clung desperately to your skin. Ambulances that arrive too late, police officers that will not meet your gaze but pack up the evidence and drive you back to base.

You are not sure when your heart begins beating again, but when it does, it is rickety and afraid and you gasp at the fire that threatens to eat you alive.

It took only fifteen minutes for three to become two to become one.

And you wonder what it means to get it right.

* * *

Dom leaves you twice.

The first time, he exits almost quietly. With broken recorders and a crimson crimson car. You have long since learned that men are not trustworthy, and you come into work the next day with bruised hands and white eyes. They promise that you all will find him, but you smile grimly and choose to wait and see for yourself instead.

And this kind of loss is new and foreign to you. Because it is daunting, and involves hillside vans and hospital basements. There is no suddenness and there is no justice and you do not know which you would prefer, but you think this might be killing you after all.

He stays gone for a long time.

Winter becomes spring, and spring will be summer soon, and then he is forced in front of a camera and you swear that you will quit if this happens again because he does not deserve to live that way. So you nearly track him around the world, and end up finding him just down the road, and this time you really do cry, because you have found the suddenness that you were lacking and it stings just as much as you remember.

The justice, however, never quite makes it.

And so there will be another funeral and another empty seat that you know they will eventually fill. The little green doll will one day follow Sam home, and Nate will look at you with sad eyes and a million explanations as you search through a garage.

It's normal.

It's natural.

It's not your fault and it's not your burden, and yet, it is because you let it be. Dom was strike four, and you're outliving the best of people for reasons you don't understand. And you find that it does not matter how long it has been, who came before or who is here now, they all find their way back to you somehow.

_April becomes May, you are seventeen and then you are twenty and still alone. Drunk drivers, late night murders and whoever said that this would ever be _fair?

Dom was skinny and nervous and oh so young. You think it should have been you because you have a good heart but that does not make it easier and it might never become right. Sometimes it is you but most of the time it's not and that is not something to be proud of.

The shadows lurking in your doorways tell you that there is nowhere to run and they mean it in every possible way. You think that it does not matter –but oh how it does- and you wait and you wish.

You wonder if you are getting somewhere worth going.

You wonder if there is any value in saying goodbye.

There is no answer to the questions you do not ask. And that does not make them any easier to bear.


End file.
